New Delhi: Argentina has a new President-elect, economist and former TV personality Javier Milei. The 53-year-old defeated the incumbent economy minister Sergio Massa of the Peronist party by securing 56 percent of the vote as against Massa’s 44 percent in the second-round runoff vote for the presidency, held Sunday.
Milei, who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, burst onto the Argentine political scene promising to upend the conventional politics and economic thought.
The Argentine economy is witnessing triple-digit inflation — consumer prices in the country rose by 142.7 percent in October, year-on-year.
In his victory speech, Milei reportedly declared that the outcome of the presidential election marked the start of the “reconstruction of Argentina”.
“Enough of the impoverishing model of the (political) caste, today we return to embrace the model of freedom to be a world power…Despite the bleakness of the situation, I want to tell you that Argentina has a future. That future exists, if that future is liberal,” Milei reportedly said during his victory speech.
“The model of decadence has come to an end, there’s no going back…We have monumental problems ahead: inflation, lack of work, and poverty…The situation is critical and there is no place for tepid half-measures,” Milei added.
According to a report by The New York Times, Milei’s policy proposals include shuttering the central bank of Argentina, cutting budgetary spending and taxes and dollarising the economy — replacing the nation’s currency with the the US dollar.
Former US President Donald Trump, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and billionaire Elon Musk were among those who congratulated Milei, apart from US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
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The anarcho-capitalist of Argentina
Milei views the state as a “large-scale criminal organisation” that robs its citizens every day and all the time. In an interview with The Economist, he said his vision is to “teach” Argentinians how “to fish” rather than giving them fish.
“So there is a discussion of a moral nature, I would say, about rejecting violence, about rejecting the advance (of the state) on property. The state finances itself with taxes, and taxes (the Spanish word for tax means ‘imposed’), clearly are called that way because they are not voluntary. So the state is an apparatus of coercion, which has a monopoly of force. And like everything that has a monopoly of a legal nature, it always ends up causing damage,” he said in the interview.
“So we understand the state as a criminal organisation, a violent organisation that lives by stealing from honest people. And (we believe that) society functions much better without a state than with a state, I mean, on an ideal level,” he added.
During the interview, Milei, however, admitted that there exists no society that functions in an anarcho-capitalist fashion and that he was proposing a “normative framework” that would push for a freer society than a repressed one.
He further argues for the dismantling of the welfare state to make “fully free” solutions and to bear the responsibility of choices accordingly. He firmly believes that socialism is an “impoverishing phenomenon” that is violent and murderous, he said in the interview.
Cuts, cuts and more cuts
In the interview with The Economist, he also promised to reduce the total number of ministries in Argentina to eight from the current 18. The ministries that will remain are: economy, infrastructure, foreign affairs, human capital, security, justice, defence and interior.
Milei is pro-life and has promised to introduce a voucher system to reform the country’s education framework, besides proposing a plan to lower taxes by about 15 percent of the total gross domestic product (GDP) of Argentina, he said in the interview.
In addition to opposing Argentina’s accession to BRICS, for which the country reportedly received an invitation earlier this year, Milei has railed against making deals with “communists”, like Brazil and China, according to media reports.
He used a chainsaw as a symbol of his campaign, waving it at rallies to show his intention to cut taxes, regulations, and usher in privatisation.
While Milei’s victory heralds a new path for Argentina, his political party, Liberty Advances, reportedly holds only 7 out of the 72 seats in the Argentinian Senate and 38 out of the 257 in the House.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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